Desdemona's shadow slithered back into its normal, innocuous form, while she remained resolutely turned away from the vile mess the punks had become.
Broom suddenly stops cleaning and looks at Rostam. "You don't know how you cast spells either? Neither do We! She stops and thinks for a moment before her eyes light up.
She stands up and leans in close to Rostam. The thin black veins at the edges of her unusually green eyes were obvious this close. They seemed to slowly writhe as she peered into Rostam's eyes, searching for something.
"Could you be like Us? The words and stuff just come to Us. Do you remember dark cold places with strange creatures when the words and gestures come to you?" she asked excitedly.
Once the creatures are down, Miniel heads over and helps clean up as best as she can, which, once again, there isn't much for her to do. After a bit of standing around, she decides to scout ahead, moving to the nearby hallway and checking the doors, listening for any signs of activity behind them.
The closet shelf was empty- a look around at the disorderly mess outside the closet door hinted that it may have once held boxes of office supplies. The bottom of the closet was a nest a lab coats, aberrant brains, spinal columns, and dissections floating in more huge jars of yellowish liquid, and the bloody remains of a human body.
It was impossible to tell what had killed the person- it was dismembered, gutted, and partially eaten, to the point that the corpse's gender was even in question. The person's purpose in coming here was clear, though- their lab coat's pockets held half a dozen vials of alchemist's fire. It looked like the punks just hadn't given them time to use them.
In the first room, Miniel found a collapsed ceiling covering most of a table and chairs and couch. It looked like there was a a body under the debris.
Looking at the vials taken from the pockets, Reine snorted.
"Someone had a good idea," she said. "We should probably split those out, and be a little careful with them."
"Jars full of dead people .... this doesn't make any sense."
"But these jars of alchemist's fire might come in useful. Maybe we can use them to burn this whole place down once we find a way out of here."
Reine nodded, and accepted one of the jars from John, tucking it into her bandoleer.
Xander drops down to help Miniel help pull out the body. Perhaps there's some information that can be gleaned from this person. He keeps a steady eye on it as they work to make sure it isn't another trick.
The body was crushed beyond recognition but in their lab coat pocket was a small steel case with room for 2 syringes. One was missing, but the other held an alchemical dose of some sort of medicine.
The next room Miniel checked would look like another typical physician’s office if it weren’t for the preponderance of grotesque anatomical sketches, most depicting traumas and deformities of the head and brain. At the far end of the room was a tidy desk. One side of the room held bookcases full of medical texts, surgical manuals, and treatises on deformities and aberrant growths.
A sturdy display case dominated the other side of the room but stood open and completely empty. Partially dried, spilled yellow liquid pooled on the floor beneath the open display door and streaked out into the hall.
"Maybe ghouls stole and ate whatever was in that cabinet?" John suggested.
"Or maybe it just grew legs and wandered off?"
Ooo, an interesting take on the old potion routine.
Xander takes a few moments to peruse some of the medical texts and poke around the desk.
"You may be correct," Xander says to John.
John helps search the desk.
Miniel shudders as she sees the syringe, even as she recognizes it as a curative formula. "I'd rather be hurt than stick myself with that, even if it'll heal me. Why can't they stick with normal things here?"
Moving on, she scans the bookcases for anything that could be of use - or anything hidden - while John and Xander look over the desk.
"Could you be like Us? The words and stuff just come to Us. Do you remember dark cold places with strange creatures when the words and gestures come to you?" she asked excitedly.
Desdemona had frozen when she heard Broom's words. Out of all this madness, there was something familiar... for the shadow-stuff she summoned simply came to her, as well.
Did that mean everyone here was infected with it?
She didn't know whether to be terrified or relieved. Certainly, the living darkness was frightening, but... if she wasn't alone with it...
Moving after the others, she was about to say something about it to Broom when the sheer magnitude of knowledge in the room sidetracked her. She opened books at random, scanning through them. This was fascinating!
*Owe this,* the darkness whispered, but she paid it no heed, for once.
Broom suddenly stops cleaning and looks at Rostam. "You don't know how you cast spells either? Neither do We! She stops and thinks for a moment before her eyes light up.
She stands up and leans in close to Rostam. The thin black veins at the edges of her unusually green eyes were obvious this close. They seemed to slowly writhe as she peered into Rostam's eyes, searching for something.
"Could you be like Us? The words and stuff just come to Us. Do you remember dark cold places with strange creatures when the words and gestures come to you?" she asked excitedly.
Rostam was taken aback, slightly. "There is...a movement..." He looked away. "I remember a place. I don't recall it being cold. Warm, hot, even. Prickling. Probing. And the creature--it's still in me, or intersecting through me. I think someone trapped it. It's slowly bonding with me. I think...I think it didn't win. It was trying to come through."
He felt embarrassed, but then returned a small smile. "So, perhaps it's related to your...Your(?)...er, condition."
Rostam grabbed an alchemist's fire, shrugging.
The desk and bookshelves here were in fine repair, but contained little of value to adventuresome types. The desk drawers were full of notes belonging to a Doctor Arosh Chawaar, who pursued new treatments for hydrocephalus. Many of these notes bore marginalia from the doctor’s sister, Doctor Anya Chawaar of Katheer.
The sum of Arosh’s research was compiled in a worn, rust-colored notebook in his desk drawer. It appeared valuable, though its worth was hard to determine. Though the legitimacy of the notes might take months to verify, most medical institutions or scholars of medicine (as one might find in any significantly sized city) might pay up to a thousand gold for the journal. Doctor Anya Chawaar, the sister in Katheer, might pay even more.
This room’s sagging ceiling rested largely upon a pair of sturdy bookshelves. A desk and set of chairs canted at precarious angles on the edge of a sizable fissure in the floor. The furniture looked set to fall into the ground at any moment, and possibly take the ceiling with it.
"Careful of the ceiling in there .... it looks like those shelves could collapse at any moment."
"Hmm. There was no sign of this chasm in the library next door. I wonder..." She doesn't step in, continuing to examine the room from the doorway.
Miniel could see that the crack in the floor led far down, deeper even than the basement levels they had all woken up in so long ago. There appeared to be a warren of cramped tunnels and smaller-than-humanoid-sized passageways snaking their way through the ground underneath the building.
After a moment of silent observation, Miniel has a thought. "Those tunnels look too small for us, but perhaps it's where those rat things came from."
"Dirty rats...."
Broom had much to think about.
"Could Rostam be like us? In our vision We were two different people, but now we aren't. Maybe he just needs time to be like We are now."
"Rostram appears to be like We were in Our vision of the past when We seemed to be divided. Perhaps in time he will change to be like We are"
"Could he be related to Us?"
"Could he be related to Us?"
She followed the party in silence as she pondered this revelation.
In the room with the chasm, she tentatively looked down into the abyss. Curious, she conjured up her lights that danced and shimmered, directing them downwards as far as she could. "Should we tell Two Tails? She might be happy to have a way home"
"You met the rat things? I have to say, I didn't really trust them..."
Broom's merrily dancing lights floated down into the crack in the floor, far past where the basement stopped, over a hundred feet down into the dark. And while there were twists and turns and outcroppings in the way, the abyss beyond the light looked like it just kept on going.
Some of the tunnels branching off the chasm looked like they had been dug but some of the passageways looked naturally occurring, but none of them were large enough for a human or even a dwarf to maneuver through.
"It doesn't look like any of us are going to fit down there."
then to Rostam "Who on earth would trust talking rats?"
"...other talking rats?" says Rostam with a shrug.
"Broom, I'm glad your lights aren't sentient or anything," he says, peering at the chasm.
"I'm advising anyone trying to explore down there in those narrow tunnels. It doesn't look like there's any path for normal sized people to pass down there." John says.
John looks to see if the ceiling is rigged as a trap.
John didn't think the ceiling was deliberately rigged as a trap, but it did look like it could very easily collapse if the furniture that was holding it up fell into the hole in the floor.
Broom laughed a bit "We much prefer the talking rats! TwoTails was kind of nice, she was very proud of her tails. Even though our encounter was violent, could you really blame them considering what is going on here? We were sorry that some of her companions died. But at least we could sort things out with here.
The rats that don't talk are the ones that hurt us really badly."
Broom frowned as she remembered being savaged by the giant rats by the chapel.
Rostram's offhand comment caught her attention though. "We don't actually know what these are, do you think they could be thinking?" she asked, her curiosity piqued.
"Maybe they are like the shadow, only made of light!" Broom cast the spell again, but this time instead of dancing wisps of light, a vaguely humanoid shape of soft purple light was conjured. "Can you understand Us? Can you speak?" she asked of it and waited for a response that never came. "Just raise your arm if you understand Us." she said. Again there was no response.
Just to be sure, she made the luminescent form glide about the room a bit. "Nope, We don't think it has a mind" she said matter of factly. "Oh, and if there is anything in the pit that you can see, We can try to get it with Our magic hand without having to climb in."
"I don't see anything down there."
"Should we head back into the office where the weird smoke-belching possessed lady was?"
"There's a door in there we haven't tried yet."
"I would like to suggest knocking away some of that furniture and closing the hole. Not only will it make it more difficult for anything ELSE to get in, but... it may be necessary to make sure nothing else gets out."
Reine simply shrugged. "Better to keep our flank secure, I suppose. But that looks pretty deep. Would the shelves be enough to plug it?"
"Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Let me see what I can do."
John fishes about in his pack and pulls out a rope and grappling hook. He motions everyone back and then tosses the hook to snag one of the shelves supporting the roof.
Then he steps back through the door to a position that seems safe and gives the rope a strong pull to try and dislodge the shelving.
The roof was sitting right on top of the bookshelf so the furniture was wedged in very tightly.
"Seems a bit sturdier than it looks...."
Miniel tries to help John, but only manages to get in the way. Elves aren't particularly known for their strength...
Broom was a little conflicted about bringing down the roof, but in the end reasoned that the roof was already broken and beyond repair. It would probably be easier to build a new one.
She wasn't very strong, but maybe there was another way she could help. Her eyes unfocused as she peered off into the distance and cast her mind out into the void looking for minds and memories that knew more about buildings and stuff.
She saw all manner of thoughts on the subject, a dizzying array of building techniques and styles. She saw architects whose minds held designs both mundane and bizarre. Engineers with ideas that were not always of this world. From all this whirling mess of information, she attempted to glean something that might be of use.
She was somewhat surprised that her little mind adventure didn't end in being traumatized by minds both unhinged and broken. "Maybe if you pulled on that side first and tried to twist it so the corner pivots over the pit" she suggested helpfully.
"All of us, on the rope, pull as one. Ready?"
As the party continues to pull on the furniture to collapse the roof, a chittering horde of rats explodes out of the crevasse and surges across the floor toward the group.
"Eeeeeeeeek!" Des screamed as she saw the flood of rats coming toward them like an inevitable tide. She leapt onto the closest high ground she could find, futile but certain instinct driving her. Flinging her hand out in a warding gesture, shadow leapt from it, falling towards the rats even as her own shadow flowed out in front of her, shielding her from the onslaught.
What is it doing? she thought in confusion, her hand still stretched as far from her as she could reach in fear. Why is it helping me?
The sly darkness whispered to her, but she refused to hear it, terror deafening her ears and her heart.
Defense:20% miss chance in normal light, 50% miss in darkness. Immunity to death effects, disease, and poison. Evasion.
Offense:
Reach 10'. Melee attacks affect incorporeal creatures as if it had the ghost touch weapon property. The eidolon’s melee attacks deal only half damage to corporeal creatures.
Broom recoils from the verminous tide "Why are there so many rats around here?!" she cried out as she scrambled back from the writhing mass.
"Not rats again..."
Rostam pulls out an alchemist's fire.
"Oh gods!" he stammers as he tries to fall back away from the horde.
The rats rushed toward the party in a disgusting, chittering wave of diseased teeth and fur. Desdemona sprayed an arc of acid across the horde, burning a broad swathe of the swarm with an eye-watering stink of singed hair and melting flesh. But it her shadow was the victor. It rose up and slammed two giant-sized fists down on the floor, smashing hundreds of rats to red paste and sweeping aside those that survived.
In the face of that magical and otherworldly display, the surviving rats fled in fear, scurrying away in every direction and no longer a threat. There was no time to cheer the victory, though, as a pair of magical missile streaked out of a dark corner of the crevasse at the most dangerous adventurer on the field- Desdemona.
Rostam could barely make out a ratling hiding just under floor level, its eyes red in the darkness of its little niche. Before he could give warning, though, a pair of rats as big as dogs charged out of the ratling's bolt hole and attacked the closest interloper- John.
Neither of the huge rats could get through John's armor, though.